Bovine leukemia virus (BLV) is a retrovirus which is the most closely related to human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV) and induces enzootic bovine leukosis (EBL), which is B lymphoma. In recent years, the number of cattle infected with BLV is increasing and, in proportion to this, the number of cattle developing BLV is increasing.
BLV has a large number of variants, and there is a demand for a tool that can detect the variants collectively in determining whether or not BLV infection is occurring. For example, Non-patent Literature 1 discloses a degenerate primer for BLV detection, capable of detecting major variants of BLV and unknown variants of BLV.